Past Exhibitions

WATCH IT! is a vibrant showcase of contemporary video art that is an
international cross section and celebration of 50 years of video art
production. If you’ve never seen video art (Laurie Anderson, William
Wegman and Nam June Paik are some of its pioneers), you must see this
exhibit.

In an exhibit that the New York Times labeled "must be seen to be believed," dancer and visual artist Nick Cave (not to be confused with the musician of the same name) debuts his hand-sewn collection of Soundsuits. The outfits are wearable art that draws on elements as diverse as African ceremonial garb and runway haute couture, and their aesthetics alone are worth a gander; but it's once the suits start to move that the real magic happens. Cave's design expertise, combined with his penchant for found materials, results in suits that, when worn, produce sounds both ethereal and spooky.

Nest is a new media installation that plays with the notions of home, technology and the natural world—a world that is all too often only experienced through the intervention of media. This exhibit will combine “nest” sculptures with animated projections and a background soundtrack to create an intimate environment.

The privately held Becker Collection, now digitally archived at Boston College, contains approximately 650 previously unexhibited drawings by mid-19th-century American artist-reporters Joseph Becker and colleagues.

On assignment for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, the era's leading illustrated periodical, a group of so-called Special Artists accompanied Union troops during the Civil War to produce firsthand drawings for publication, giving a glimpse into the life of an artist embedded within the armed forces.

Civil War Drawings from the Becker Collection is curated by Judith Bookbinder and Sheila Gallagher and the traveling...

"Nature and the
Non-Objective Realm" is a re-installation of the Taubman’s Contemporary
Gallery based on photography, painting and sculpture by artists who are
represented in the Taubman
Museum's permanent
collection or have works that are designated as "promised gifts" to
the Taubman Museum of Art. The selection is comprised of exemplary works by
mostly southeastern artists and emphasizes the relationship between early
modern figurative and landscape traditions, and the successive development of
abstract and non-objective styles in contemporary art.

Kiel Johnson’s works are meticulous homages to near-obsolete machines. Based in LA, Johnson embraces his signature industrial cardboard to create objects of exacting detail, high skill from low material. Polaroid cameras, boom boxes with cassette tapes, microphones—all are made by hand to reinforce the tactile that has been lost in these times of virtual technology. The centerpiece of the show will be his life-sized faux printing press. Entitled Publish or Perish, the boxy sculpture is composed of a series of cardboard tubes along with a bank of fake batteries to “power” it, a nod to his memories of hearing his newspaper publisher father’s presses humming. His fascination with things...

In the words of the artist:
“Language has accounted for the image, the subject and the source of my work for a long time. An academic background in comparative linguistics, applied linguistics, and Spanish and French provided a rigorous method and discipline for scrutinizing the smallest mechanisms by which language operates and for dissecting and analyzing almost invisible components of language. But academia did not furnish a sympathetic framework or audience for investigating and presenting alternative ideas about language which came from digging around in it and excavating unorthodox and previously unnoticed sub-systems which operate independently of authorized rules. Because many...

The Influence Project is a collaborative exhibit that gives you the power to influence a virtual work of art. The artwork will continue to change as it is influenced by its participants. Check out the progress and get started now! Go to http://influenceproject.org and Paint Your Part.

For years, Tim Tate has established himself as a skilled glass artist, and one whose work seems to draw more from tattoo art and the science lab than from the history of blown and cast objects. His latest work is a curious hybrid, an unexpected combination of craft and technology, what he calls “self-contained video installations.” Over the last three years, this Washington D.C.-based artist has attracted critical attention for his group of sculptures that look at the past through the lens of new media. These objects are intimate glass reliquaries that each contain a tiny video screen with a short looped film, along with ambient soundtrack.
Lately, these films have become for Tate...

Helene
Steene is an artist drawn to line, form, and color. The level of abstraction
varies in her works, but she has stated that she is always searching for inner
beauty and a harmonious balance of elements. Several of the pieces on display
were inspired by the landscape and colors of the Greek island Paros, where the artist has a home and visits
periodically. Steene works with diverse medias including oil, acrylic,
encaustic, monotypes, collage, fiber, although most of the works on view here at
the Taubman combine sand, metal,
acrylic, oil and marble dust—a media that reminds her of the white marble dusted
buildings of Greece. The saturated colors, depth of texture and...